Disruption due to an issue at Dawlish (18/10)

[uglymonkey]

But it's not most extreme is it. It's normal for Dawlish in the Autumn/Winter.

 

[VP185]

Could Hitachi send teams of fitters for ‘instant standby’ duties at Dawlish when adverse conditions are forecast.
From comments above they could do resets, overrides, emergency coupling and so on.
More useful than having them at Stoke Gifford.

They do! It doesn’t work. They require a full wash down to remove all salt!
It’s been known that once the roof has dried out and the set has gone through the carriagewash the salt has been reactivated and the engines shut down!

 

[trebor79]

So what's wrong with my idea of having overhead gantries at either end of the seawall to douse the units with fresh water when waves are coming over the wall? Wash the salt off, reset the engine, no drama.

 

[AndrewE]

They require a full wash down to remove all salt!
It’s been known that once the roof has dried out and the set has gone through the carriagewash the salt has been reactivated and the engines shut down!

So what's wrong with my idea of having overhead gantries at either end of the seawall to douse the units with fresh water when waves are coming over the wall? Wash the salt off, reset the engine, no drama.

sounds good to me... in fact it's exactly what I thought!

 

[irish_rail]

The solution to the IET problem is to be able to isolate the Rheo brake in certain circumstances - that needs a modification to the units but should be possible. It isn’t only Dawlish that causes the issue because basically wherever you can get salty water on the roof in quantity, the traction is at grave risk of shorting out. Penzance is another area that can cause issues.

Looking at what happened at Dawlish this week and without breaking too many confidences, the decision making process to determine what colour condition should have been declared and when was interesting, as were the decisions on the service. There are fine judgements to be made by NR here and I don’t envy them (especially their staff on site) that task because it has real implications for what service you can safely operate and on which lines. A train operator is entirely reliant on NR to tell them what is possible but obviously wants to run a service.

I’m not one that likes to give up at the first opportunity but there has to be times when you should play safe, even for just a couple of hours, and not try and force things through. I have seen at first hand the damage that is done to both 15x and HST sets from running through Dawlish in bad weather and it isn’t good. You don’t usually get the instant failure that a 80x or 22x gives you (although that has occurred) but there can be damage to fix afterwards.

If the Rheo brake issue isn’t fixed soon, NR will have no choice but to restrict the IET sets, even in amber conditions. Dawlish isn’t getting any easier and days like the one this week are going to be more frequent with interruptions to service, irrespective of the stock type used, becoming more common.

Thanks for this CY, so it seems my suspicions about the rheo brake causing issues is partly the case. I've another suggestion, can we just bin off the Rheo brake altogether? Drivers hate it. Catering staff hate it. It causes passengers to lose balance if standing up. And the 800s which don't have it on diesel, brake far "nicer" than the dreaded 802s with the Rheo brake operative.....